I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
1–10 of 277 posts
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#2The author was essentially too smart to be blind.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#3The author was essentially too smart to be blind.
I wonder whether talking about "looking at the javascript console" somehow made them think that this person cannot possibly be blind, since how could a blind person "see" the JavaScript console? (But "having my screen reader read the content of the JavaScript console to me" is a bit of a mouthful.)
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#4The author was essentially too smart to be blind.
I wonder whether talking about "looking at the javascript console" somehow made them think that this person cannot possibly be blind, since how could a blind person "see" the JavaScript console? (But "having my screen reader read the content of the JavaScript console to me" is a bit of a mouthful.)
You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me.
For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner.
Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way.
Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest of sighted culture.
And then once in a great while, we get condescended to for it. There's a really good example of this in the second season episode of DS9, The Alternate.
``` ODO It was a dilemma for me. I'd never seen anything like these creatures either.
MORA
"Seen" isn't really an appropriate
description. He had no eyes per
se...
ODO
I was only trying to describe it in
simple terms...
MORA
(ignoring that)
He had never perceived anything like
us before... go on...
I can pretty much guarantee that every blind person has had a condescending, patronizing douche canoe like Mora in their life at least once.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#5The title kind of makes it appear far less of a problem than it actually is, because according to the article, hCaptcha made multiple rude and evidence-free accusations of lying despite the author actually being blind.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#6That smells illegal.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#7This has got to be an open-and-shut lawsuit if the author wants to pursue it. T&C doesn't shield you from the ADA.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#8I hope AI stuff makes captchas completely obsolete soon. I am sick of them. The cure is worse than the disease.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#9I hope AI stuff makes captchas completely obsolete soon. I am sick of them. The cure is worse than the disease.
Captchas have been obsolete for the past decade plus.
With solving services like DeathByCaptcha and AntiCaptcha, it takes seconds to solve them. It costs something like $1.90 per 1,000 successfully solved captchas using human typers and OCR. It can easily be rolled into your code with a few lines.
Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)
#10The title kind of makes it appear far less of a problem than it actually is, because according to the article, hCaptcha made multiple rude and evidence-free accusations of lying despite the author actually being blind.
Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work.
This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is that it should have been transparently obvious that this approach is completely infeasible and unscalable. As big as Google, Facebook, or Amazon are, they would struggle under the load of trying to create a system for determining who is "truly" blind... and that's still true if we ignore questions like exactly what "blind" is anyhow.
This shouldn't have gotten deployed and then become a problem; it should have been a 5 minute diversion in the meeting where it was proposed to analyze it's completely infeasible and never made it to so much as the design phase, let alone the deployment phase.
If you had a system for completely accurately identifying characteristics like "who is blind" in the presence of extremely hostile attacks on the system, you'd have something far more valuable than the CAPTCHA system itself! The whole idea intrinsically depends on having a stronger solution to the problems CAPTCHAs are meant to solve than the CAPTCHA system itself provides... it's fundamentally a logically unsound idea.